You Are What You Read or Watch: Controlling Your Media Diet

Marvin Liao
2 min readSep 3, 2024

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I love books and reading. To encourage my kid to enjoy reading like I do, we have a rule in my house that whatever book she wants to read I will buy for her. Whatever the costs and however many books she wants. That has been good until 2021. Her friend had read a book and she really wanted to read it too.

It was called “They Both Die at the End” by Adam Silvera. I think you can guess what the book is about. It’s about two gay guys who spend their last day together. I looked at it and thought, well if her friend read it and it’s rated as teen level book so it must be okay. BIG Mistake.

Amber was 11 at that time and she went super dark, weird and even somewhat suicidal after reading this book. It made me dig in deeper into the book and I realized how badly I messed up. Not sure if Adam Silvera is doing this purely for the money or is a hard left nut pushing awful ideology. He is going to burn in hell for pushing evil and dangerous ideas on young impressionable teens who are frankly clueless and naive.

This is symptomatic of the invasion of our kid’s brains by bad mind worms from left and right wing ideologues, albeit I’m in California so it’s the hard left extremist nutcases over here. It’s so awful. But ultimately this is my fault by not managing my family’s media diet better.

We do this damage to ourselves by watching the mass media garbage on Fox and CNN. Both of them are wings of the same bird. Hollywood, especially Disney, is particularly pernicious. Most of the newspapers are awful too. We also get our brains inflamed by scrolling through Instagram or X aka Twitter or worse, from the CCP controlled TikTok. This is why my kids’ social media is limited to 2 hours a day and TikTok is not allowed at all.

But sadly all this awful idea-garbage has infiltrated most of the households of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Western Europe. And it’s why many young people don’t believe in our values of the West anymore. Propaganda works sadly. This is a war at many levels now, not just a kinetic one but a mental & psychological one too.

So my point is you must take control and manage your personal media diet carefully for yourself and your family. You are what you read and watch. So filter very thoughtfully here.

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Marvin Liao

Ever curious: Tsundoku, Reader, Aspiring Shokunin, World traveller, Investor & Tech/Media exec interested in almost everything! www.marvinliao.com